The Universality of Human Rights: Developing Narratives to Help Overcome Polarization

Key Publication Proposes a New Take on Human Rights Universality

The Briefing The Universality of Human Rights: Developing Narratives to Overcome Polarization discusses the idea of universality with a twofold purpose.

On the one hand, the briefing zooms into the main challenges that the idea of universality faces nowadays, offering a typology as well as a detailed analysis thereof – backed by examples taken from the practice of the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council and its surrounding institutions. On the other hand, the briefing seeks to offer some elements on which a more consequential and effective narrative of human rights universality can be devised and put into practice – one that overcomes these challenges and is better able to persuade sceptics.

 In discussing the main contemporary challenges to universality, the briefing zooms into six issue areas where the debates are particularly acute: freedom of expression in the context of digitalization, terrorism and other alleged threats to security, climate change, international investment law, development, and minority rights. This zooming provides a basis on which to start thinking about a new take on human rights universality based on the idea of equal human dignity.

The briefing also addresses the critiques of critical and third-world scholars on human rights universality – critiques which need to be addressed in order to avoid repeating hegemonical practices of the past and discusses the main challenges to human rights universality that are visible in the current practice of the UN human rights system and groups them into three main categories:

• The contestation of the limits of human rights through the means of restriction and derogation is often used to impair their application to certain persons or groups. This is particularly visible in the current debates on freedom of expression in the context of digitalization and terrorism.
• The exclusion of human rights altogether from the discussion of certain issues, usually through technical expertise or legalistic arguments. This has historically been the case, for example, with regard to climate change and international investment law.
• Relativism, or the idea that the values underlying human rights are dependent on the specific cultural, social and local political contexts of each human community. This provides a cover for unjustifiable human rights violations and makes any possibility of accountability and oversight impossible. Instances of relativism are present in the global debates on development and minority rights.

Three Human Rights Conversations

During the course of the project, three Human Rights Conversations discussed the issue of universality in relation to digitalization, third-world approaches to international law (TWAIL), and minority issues.